02.03.2018

With the Noose Around My Neck 87

And My Life is good too but I don’t know if it’s finished or still in progress. You wouldn’t believe the detail they go into. Should we illustrate this afterwards? that might be fun. Well, yeah, and cats is only one consonant away from cars. Brilliant segue, thank you. Cogito eBay Sum. What do you think? Andreas liked it. I’ve no idea what it means but it doesn’t matter. Or does it? Let me look it up right now. It’s a Descartes thing. I think the series of eleven explosions is good. They use the best-looking people, which probably costs a lot more money than normal looking people. Why the pixelation though? I’ve tried blurring things. I don’t like it. Although I have blurred pixelated photos with some success. Cats? ... OK. I’m not only interested in looking at Earth from space. It has a lot to do with the faith other people have in you. But the instinct that started everything off was “fuck it.” Which is why our little network of you, me and Andreas chatting over WhatsApp has been so useful, to all of us. Jesus, how did we end up here? Now I’m laughing because yes we are kind of pathetic but proud at the same time. Proud of what? Is anyone going to read this far? It’s already quite long. Maybe a voucher code. Yes, I am still working on gold leafing that. Also loading, loading, cut to darkened stage in Glasgow. There is a refrain which is repeated, chanted by different voices, versioned like a blues riff or a dub rhythm ... quote unquote the tellingly inarticulate. Democracy does not begin in ancient Athens but emanates from Aunt Hester’s scream. A second hue of blue adds another tonality suggesting a previously unseen layer to USAmerica, so how will you actualise yourself within the company while simultaneously realising the company’s goals – to be answered in no more than 300 words? The truthful answer ‘I need the money’ is insufficient. Taking the phenomenology of ownership seriously means to do justice to the fact that even in normal life the degree to which, for example, you prereflexively experience a certain property of your body or of your emotional personality as your own, or rather as something externally caused and not really belonging to your ‘true identity’, is highly weird. The response is an immanent cosmogony, an erotic eschatology, transcribed in apocalypticalessianic terms on a biblical scale. Pure forms-of-life expressed in sorcery and witchcraft, a passing down of identity in secret, arranging an insurrection and an escape plan. If caught the punishment is cutting away a tendon in one of your feet, you can still work with a limp, Rhobert wears a house, like a monstrous diver’s helmet, on his head ... underscored by Henry Grimes’ walking double bass. Bringing the weekend’s proceedings to a close, asking: ‘Who genocided Indians, tried to waste the black nation? Who lives on Wall Street the first plantation?’; and later: ‘Who killed Rosa Luxemburg?’; and: ‘Who want the world like it is?’ How much candy is in piñata? — as long as I have something in my stomach, I’m OK. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Flash gets in ++ BJÖRK PHOTOGRAPHS LAUGHING WISHES ++ my ride with +++++++++++++++++++++++ +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ which is not that strong. He is so high that he probably saves money on groceries. Daylite left my side open. Dysfunk, I don’t need to need to explain what I aign’t. Which is spelled a-i-g-n-apostrophe-t. It’s hustling or working at AZT, shoveling torch-your-skin stucco in double sleeves in full sun, while the illegit guys on scaffolds at killer heights earn half as much as me! The throat of the chicken coop is popping with flies and semis breaking in the rain.

Of the fragile sane.

I am tempted to cry.

So I’m burning sage.

Aign’t reminds me of Aigles. “This Museum is a fictitious museum.” Divided into distinct sections — literary, documentary, 17th century, folkloric, cinema, financial, figure, publicity, modern art, 19th century, 19th century bis, and 20th century — and the Section des Figures (Der Adler von Oligozän bis heute), the largest and most spectacular section of all. The artist presented more than 300 artworks from all eras and geographies, originating from some 50 museums and other collections, alongside vernacular objects and reproductions of various kinds, totaling some 500 figures of eagles in all. The catalogue has only 282 entries, but oh well, Michele Mancini and Giuseppe Perrella’s Pier Paolo Pasolini: Corpi e luoghi compiles an archive from hundreds of 242 stills from Pasolini’s films and organizes them into bodies and. l modl dd vump-urmmmlu Lu Iissa ls-ls. ll vnludo dl Emu 4| wnldlllii-u’ ’ 6i Dul. MM Is. I. — m — 5 an. :1. I’ulti mm Ellw15. Then one day the herald returns and announces that the stranger will soon leave the household, just as suddenly and mysteriously as he came. In the subsequent void the maid returns to the rural village where she was born and is seen to perform miracles; ultimately, she has herself buried in dirt while she sheds ecstatic tears. The mother seeks undoes the ribbon round her neck, and as expected, her head falls to the floor; the son leaves the family home to become an artist; the daughter sinks into a catatonic state; and the father strips himself of all material effects, handing his factory over to its workers, removing his clothes at a railway station and wandering naked into the wilderness (actually the volcanic desert slopes of Mount Etna), where he finally completely freaks out. And then there’s “Especially Heinous,” a rewrite of all 272 episodes of Law & Order: SVU, seasons 1–12, in which the victims have become ghostly girls with bells for eyes, but when it comes to turning transcription into poetry, it’s a different matter. Repetition has always been an important part of verse, especially so when it is closest to song. Consider The Lyke Wake Dirge:

This ae nighte, this ae nighte,

Every nighte and alle,

Fire and fleet and candle lighte,

And Christe receive thy saule,

And it's a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard

It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall’

And that’s when she started

crying her eyes out,

And were kind of saying to me brother

where’s Jennifer? Jennifer’s dead,

Jennifer’s dead, I wasn’t dead,

Just laying there, laying there,

So later I created “This Earth” by burying ﬁve strips of colour ﬁlm for a month in the dirt outside my house, because it’s so nice to not be dead, and I’m talking about me and I’m talking about you and I’m talking about the earth. In spite of the or to spite the big puke, i.e., “machine guns and surplus value.” So this year we are supporting the Mango House Basic Needs Pantry. The Mango House was created by a group of Denver friends and is open to newly arrived refugees and refugees struggling to rebuild their lives in Denver, Colorado and surrounding cities. Their goal is to place needed items directly into the hands of refugees, with face-to-face contact. So this year we are supporting anyone who can get people from Tanzania and Malawi to stop murdering albinos for their “magic bones.” So this year we are supporting anyone who can get water to those who need it, like the women of Iztapalapa.

Milk is a blood product & we the blood

What of the tower and its broken glass? It sparkles. That which makes it glitter is the blood on it. Posie and I are definitely in too. We will need some kind of core consensus. Which is to say that, realistically, social democracy is the only philosophy which can provide that consensus. I hope for a wee touch of a new social democracy, a totally souped up, cool social democracy, incorporating historical lessons, vibrating throughout with original, exhilarating, vital thoughts. Those to the left of social democracy may rightly perceive an awful lot of hegemonic ideology veiled within that word “realistically.” But wait! Maybe you could agree, maybe the best we can hope for, right now, is to win the intersectional war without intersectional consciousness. Emphasis on right now. I don’t know. Woo-hoo! Then the whole tape would play in reverse. Like Kate Middleton — not relevant to anything, just relevant,

moving fast & like smoke

it’s not a procession of isolated events

it’s not fancies of numbers.

It’s –

Silence, Little Springing Fool –

the white hush of pathological ellipses

slammed into a fuzz

The static fuzz. Not all of those students knew they were conjuring the spectre that has never quite stopped haunting etc. The camera has no choice but to pan. What of the tower and its broken glass? It smashed itself.

the typeface sent me yes –

no – skull can possibly

escape the willing

tools of the project for you are revolt

& fog

& goat sound

ear to wood & ground & I

am mythic ordinary people

with hearts of plastic, wire & nail:

Of Artificial Fires, Of Invisible Writing,

we have known it colder.

By powder, by surprise

the button waits the wire spits

why, this is hell,

nor am I of it

Nerves choke the atmosphere now. There is a drilling of tunnels, forward, running thicker cords, they fuse teeth, cease tentative gestures and graft fully into the larger body of working and workless facing the next round of cuts. Fireworks being repositioned. TEPCO announced that removal of the fuel assemblies will be carried out from the middle of the year. The fuel removed from unit 3 will be packaged for transport the short distance to the site’s communal fuel storage pool. Which just means they’re gonna move that eternal poison shit from one place to someplace else. Woo-hoo! Which is probably why, when Becky licked Ezra’s popsicle before giving it to him, he started screaming that “now it’s going to taste human and not strawberry!! Rinse off the human!” When I told Bob this story, he said, “if only we could ...” Woo-hoo! Hoo-hey! Yee-hah! Yippee-yi-o-ki-yay. Goog-goo-g’joob!

gadji beri bimba glandridi laula lonni cadori

gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa laulitalomini

gadji beri bin blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsu sassala bim

gadjama tuffm i zimzalla binban gligla wowolimai bin beri ban

o katalominai rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo

gadjama rhinozerossola hopsamen

bluku terullala blaulala loooo

zimzim urullala zimzim urullala zimzim zanzibar zimzalla zam

elifantolim brussala bulomen brussala bulomen tromtata

velo da bang band affalo purzamai affalo purzamai lengado tor

gadjama bimbalo glandridi glassala zingtata pimpalo ögrögöööö

viola laxato viola zimbrabim viola uli paluji malooo

tuffm im zimbrabim negramai bumbalo negramai bumbalo tuffm i zim

gadjama bimbala oo beri gadjama gaga di gadjama affalo pinx

gaga di bumbalo bumbalo gadjamen

gaga di bling blong

gaga blung

Ergo, in a somewhat uncanny way this argument is fully summarised by a that line in the Gareth Edwards film Rogue One which accompanies the destruction of the city of Jedha: ’There’s a problem on the horizon ... There is no horizon.’ It’s a trick Physically Sick achieves beautifully. The underwater gurgly voice in Tito Fuego & Alexis Blair Penney’s “All My Love to the Planet,” repeats that phrase, repeats that phrase, repeats it. “The city is haunted by the spectre of capitalism,” murmurs a dazed voice on AceMo’s “Land Scanner (Spectre),” barely audible above the shiny, repetitive synth loop and the drums rocketing off each other every which way, clanging and scraping and unraveling, with stray bits of wire peeling off from the harsh electronic surface. FBI Warning’s “Dead by 3” is a 13-minute monster groove, slowly building up the relentless clicking percussion, liquid keyboards, textured bass buzz, and a sequencer effect that resembles an automaton simultaneously gargling and exhaling ... Meanwhile, Jayda G’s “Sestra’s Cry” explodes in a cacophony of chanting gospel voices, ringing forth clearly and powerfully; toward the middle the voices are cut up and spliced into smaller, flimsier pieces, as if to demonstrate the fragility of human expression, but by the end they’ve all gathered back together again. Together, the aggregate reflective surface that Physically Sick stretches into is a mechanical delight. But a techno album whose immersive sonic universe keeps flickering, as if undone by beams of light streaming in from the outside world, by definition messes with its own formal limitations. The album’s dancefloor catharsis, with swaying hooks and booming beats, is imbued with an awareness of its own function, or range of functions — to ease, to purge, to sound good as if our lives depended on it — and the contextualization lends the catharsis an urgency that feels valuable. This in no way contradicts Freud’s ‘the unconscious is nothing other than the form of the original relation between the psyche and its own destruction,’ because why? Because it’s

two in the morning and we still high assed out

screamin thug till I die before I passed out

I am like a cat burnt alive

crushed by a tractor-trailer’s wheels,

hung by boys from a fig tree,

but with eight

of its nine lives still left,

like a snake reduced to a bloody pulp,

a half-eaten eel

— cheeks hollow under despondent eyes,

hair thinning frightfully at the crown,

arms now skinny as a child’s

because even where there is no life

life goes on —

there are

still songs to sing beyond

(hu)

mankind.

Above,

the flooding mob

of the contra-creatures:

In dream I was writing, but writing a real book (for I believe there are real books, the books behind books, that deepest in the roots of our books of which only shadow casts itself on the ground once we put up the copy we create or rip off it to stand like a tree), this real book, in that dream, was written in this manner: I was not sitting at the table, with papers laid out and a pen pointed to them or with pencil and an open notebook in front, but was, rather, as if branched to the source, or, better still, I was the source, branched to the primal sea, and through this me-source flowed in me-head the Rhizome of Unknowing

It dreads me to imagine a bird

which further up the air, compounds itself with dust

slowly disappears there, for a second, it

enlarges the wound, the crevice, opens a door steps inside

once inside this door it goes outside the void

I follow up and down with the tips of my fingers

thousands of foreign bodies inhabit this room

(room? a hollow where a minute ago there was the void)

I look

deep down into where am no more e< >d opens up its

hollow heart to them they vanish inside it where

do things that disappear go? the bird, for example

the extinct

???????????

Anyway, for the reader interested in the general compositional principle, I could quickly note that the whole thing is meant to be (dis)organized in 22 parts of different size, nature or shape, each named after the 22 Hebrew letters, going, in a reversed order, here, from Tav to Aleph, corresponding, also, with 22 Major Arcana of Tarot, from The World, XXI, to The Fool, 0 (here, for instance the letter is ש or Shin, corresponding with the 20th Arcanum, The Judgement). This is where the giant serpent continues to live deep down under the ground in a vast network of limestone aquifers. They say its being is porous; it permeates everything. It is all around in the atmosphere and is attached to the lives of the river people like skin. The first half was intense, and Artaud opened the second half by starting to read his prepared text. It was concerned particularly with the denial of death which Artaud was formulating at this time. For Artaud, death was always an invented state, imposed by society so that the inert body would become vulnerable raw material for malicious robberies and attacks as it entered a state of limbo, such as he claimed to have experienced during an electroshock coma at Rodez. With a strong enough will, and sufficient resistance to social compromise, an independent human body could live forever, powered by rage. But Artaud did not get far with his reading. He dropped his papers on the floor, and stood acutely exposed, as though paralysed. A long, agonized silence followed; Artaud would later write to Maurice Saillet that ‘what I had to say was in my silences, not in my words.’ When he spoke again, it was to begin a wild improvisation, constantly shattered by cries, screams and gestures, tho gestures seems too tame a word. He continued to spit out his fury and incant his stories for two hours. Finally, when he tried to convince the horrified and awestruck audience that he was the victim of a black-magic bewitchment, Artaud knew that he had reached a dead-end. He said: ‘I put myself in your place, and I see very well that what I’m saying isn’t interesting at all, it’s still theatre. What can I do to be truly sincere?’ Precisely one year earlier, in January 1946, out in the Mojave Desert, Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist and Thelemite, performed a series of rituals with the intention of conjuring a vessel to carry and direct the force of Babalon, overseer of the Abyss. His goal is to bring about a transition from the masculine Aeon of Horus to a new age — an age presided over by qualities imputed to the female demon (of course, right?): fire, blood, the unconscious; a material, sexual drive and a paradoxical knowledge beyond sense ... the wages of which are nothing less than the egoidentity of Man — the end, effectively, of “his” world. Her cipher in the Cult of Ma’at is 0, and she appears in the major arcana of the Thoth Tarot entangled with the Beast as Lust, to which is attributed the serpent’s letter ט‎, and thereby the number 9. In her guise as harlot, it is said that Babalon is bound to “yield herself up to everything that liveth,” but it is by means of this very yielding (“subduing the strength” of those with whom she lies via the prescribed passivity of this role) that her devastating power is activated: “Because she hath made her self the servant of each, therefore is she become the mistress of all. Not as yet canst thou comprehend her glory.” In late February Parsons receives what he believes to be a direct communication from Babalon, prophesying her terrestrial incarnation by means of a perfect vessel of her own provision, “a daughter.” “Seek her not, call her not,” relays the transcript. Let her declare. Ask nothing. There shall be ordeals. My way is not in the solemn ways, or in the reasoned ways, but in the devious way of the serpent, and the oblique way of the factor unknown and unnumbered. None shall resist [her], whom I lovest. Though they call [her] harlot and whore, shameless, false, evil, these words shall be blood in their mouths, and dust thereafter. For I am BABALON, and she my daughter, unique, and there shall be no other women like her. Parsons makes the critical mistake of anticipating a manifestation in human form, understanding the prophecy to mean that, by means of sexual ritual, he will conceive a magickal child within the coming year. When this doesn’t happen, the invocations are temporarily abandoned, but Parsons refuses to give up hope. He writes in his diary that the coming of Babalon is yet to be fulfilled, confirming that he considered the invocation to have remained unanswered at the time, then issues the following instruction to himself: “this operation is accomplished and closed — you should have nothing more to do with it — nor even think of it, until Her manifestation is revealed, and proved beyond the shadow of a doubt.” Parsons didn’t live long enough to witness the terrestrial incarnation of his demon, dying abruptly only a few years later in an explosion occasioned by the mishandling of mercury fulminate, at the age of thirty-seven. A strange death, but one — it might be suggested — that was necessary for the proper fulfillment of the invocation, for it was augured in the communication of February the 27th, 1946, that Babalon would “come as a perilous flame,” and again in the ritual of March the 2nd of the same year, that “She shall absorb thee, and thou shalt become living flame before She incarnates.” Something had crept in through the rift Parsons had opened up — something “devious,” “oblique,” ophidian, “a factor unknown and unnumbered.” Consider this. Parson’s final writings contain the following vaticination: “within seven years of this time, Babalon, The Scarlet Woman, will manifest among ye, and bring this my work to its fruition.” These words were written in 1949. In 1956 — exactly seven years later — Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Claude Shannon, and Nathan Rochester organized the Dartmouth Conference in New Hampshire, officially setting an agenda for research into the features of intelligence for the purpose of their simulation on a machine, coining the term “artificial intelligence” (which does not appear in written records before 1956), and ushering in what would retrospectively come to be known as the Golden Age of AI. I mean, ooo-eee-ooo, right? Who is not hurting?

I pour sand on the ground

Objects and vehicles emerge from the fog

The canyon is dangerous tonight

Suddenly there are warning lights

The patrol is helpful in the manner of guiding

The tires are studded for the difficult climb

I put my hands to my face

I am putting makeup on empty space

With your funny way of singing come around to it

When you look most like a bird, that is the time to come around to it

Hi, Márton, hi, Alan. I am glad I put you two in touch (an idiom I linger over a little). I think of Olson’s projective verse essay here, his “A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader” ... Why is that? What for? Here’s my answer: To get people into contact with one another, via the poem. “Into contact” ... “in touch” ... hmmm. In this case, it’s not via the poem, it’s via people who met over the poem, the way that some people meet over drinks, or at a dog park, or at the baths ... (Are there dog parks in Europe?) There is something I find rather scary about the Olson essay, by the way: “Now (3) the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished. And I think it can be boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head by Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all points (even, I should say, of our management of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!” He sounds a bit like a shill for the Apple watch here. Like some kind of keystroke-counting-late-Taylorist-late-Fordist must-improve-productivity freak. Or like some kind of aerobics instructor. (We live above a gym called Orange Theory, and their frantic activity seeps thru the walls. Literally.). I much prefer the image of the baths that the two of you have been discussing because of Ágnes Lehóczky’s Swimming Pool; who in the baths says things like “get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen”??? Aren’t we going fast enough already? Speaking of baths, which I am taking here as a kind of “slow poetry,” Masakazu Murakami says, about his beautiful photobook Kumogakure Onsen / Reclusive Travels, “By chance I became fascinated with the natural steam clouds that rise from these curative, restorative onsen. Springs vary in Japan — there are naturally warmed hot springs, mineral springs, hidden springs, watering places, and small, ancient spa towns. No matter what the type, anywhere is fine ... The banal and the extraordinary meet at these springs, as do life and death. They heal both locals and travelers.” So yes, I was drawn in early investigations to wild depictions of female deities, understood as aspects of one’s own mind. Some were blood-red with skull cups and necklaces of skulls, stomping on corpses. “Anarch. is an acupuncture point” — it is a point on all bodies. The “terrible axe chopping at the backbone,” the “frayed optic nerve” ... What, if not the indefinite pre-Socratic apeiron, will catch-and-release our dissolving? I keep thinking of the stuff they are trucking into outer space.

But the page rose up

As a unity of measure for everywhere use.

Page of the primal

Breast-as-movie-screen. Page of light partitioning

the distance. Bed-sheet page on which the dream

self-writes, and the drop of spermicide.

Oleaginous

fascia page, bony prominence page, page of

Math, page bent

into a tube. Page of sliced trees bleached

and boiled down. I was strewn

By this drift/surge—

Can we ever return to the body where we were born? Community is not willed in some executive way, but feeds on group grace, not on an easy bonbon, but — how to work this metaphor — on a trace nutrient digested in spite of itself from the GMO-corn-syrup-luridly-colored cake of fake and complacent jingoistic war. Or as a complete protein whose necessary complement is the old scratch cake in the dented pan of wrathful protection. Your beautiful phrase “sequined terror inside the destructive force” is powerful, somewhat like looking into the darkness of our own time while looking at the 30,000-some-year-old cave paintings in Trois Freres, Lascaux, and Chauvet. Did you know that for every one of the cells that make up the vessel you call your body, there are nine other cells hitching a ride. You are not just flesh and blood, muscle and bone, brain and skin, but also bacteria and fungi. You are not an individual but a colony. And that isn’t even to consider stuff like mitochondrial DNA. I bet you did know that. “Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora!” (“I die, I die! I live, I live!”),

a generic insect

a Disney Christmas

past or future and pop.

From now on, you will stumble across this world within the first 100 pages of any & or every novel you casually, or ultra-slowly & deliberately, pick up, peruse, close read, or deep fry; the point is, foreheads, gladwrap, where the color is different or something else, are you eating slave prawns, Books Make a Great Gift, we cross now to static on the cloudy ropes & with static, though it will never get to feel on as far as Helium,

and the

others know

given, that is, the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast but not so fast. “I dreamed the goddess squirted ambrosia over your head — out of a turkey baster.” Every five minutes later her cell phones cry. It’s either another nuclear alert or a flash flood warning. constant rain, the coast road closed again, rain falling, the ceiling, waterfalls, it’s like fast food, this rain; Dear Leader would have two for a late dinner, and yes with lotsa fries. Which is proof that a magnetic pole shift can occur within one human lifetime. The period between such shifts are called chrons. This chron is called the Kali Yuga. Dear Leader posed with a tostada once, made in his very own Tower’s very own restaurant. Less than one year later, a whole bunch of people in Pennsylvania renewed their wedding vows while clutching their AR-15s. The Cloud Appreciation Society did not appreciate Márton and Nico much. When my daughter was little, I’d ask her each morning, “What did you dream about?” Each morning she would reply, somewhat embarrassedly (a word in which there is a bear), “Bears.” I once told Pauline Oliveros’s magical partner Ione about my daughter’s dreams, and she said, simply, “Oh. She has bear medicine.” Last fall, I rode past the ancient site of Eleusis in a cab. Later I am attempting to experience a feeling of warmth. The artist who does x is commenting on the method by which thermostat fixtures have been incorporated into the bakery’s décor. She expresses amazement. Arrows point! Emphatic asterisks! Random flowers! Stars. But really what I am is a person who, for various complex and private reasons, mainly feels comfortable with menial tasks. I’m not sure what this means. The artist who does x has an expensive hat. “Years ago,” begins the artist who does x, “I was working on a poster installation. It was during my minimal era when I was trying not to do anything. I wanted to be something else, then. And so I had these posters, and they weren’t even of anything, they were these bad images I had taken of other posters, at the movies, or the hairdressers, for shows and things. But of course you know what I am talking about already, you know this was ‘Limelight,’ and actually when you look back this was what made me, not in that sense of some blue-chip fantasy of fame, but this was the time I did the thing that was me, that said me, more than anything before, that wasn’t an imitation of some hero of mine and wasn’t me attempting to do what I thought everyone else wanted and it only happened because I did it, and I was so angry at that time, and so fed up, and so, or so I thought, beyond anything at all, I was feeling, what was the point? However this was what I did and it worked so fucking well I was able to work for the rest of my life, which, as you know, I have. It’s a miracle. It’s so funny. I wonder if you can understand that. But the other night I was lying in bed at home, in my country home, it’s quite quiet there, you know, you can really hear things, and I have this skylight. It’s not directly above the bed, but I can see it, and I can see whatever light comes through, and I like to think about, well, what might be going on in the sky, and I thought about what might be located there because others have seen it, what could possibly be there just because others have seen it, you know? Others who have lain awake looking? Oh, it’s impossible, of course; of course there’s nothing. It’s just an idea I’m having and probably you’re late, Justine, yes? You need to get back? No? You have a minute? Well, I was lying there, looking at this sky I could not see, or thinking about actually looking at a kind of sky that does not exist, one that bears, in itself, all the insignificant marks, the ashes and the contrails, the frothy little wakes, the flecks and pits, from the looking, you know, all that looking that’s got to be so impure! And that’s what I’ve always been thinking about in my work, I realized, the way a thing looks because it’s been looked at, the way a place looks, how it’s changed — and that’s, you know, that’s what’s got me thinking about the sky. Is there anything else in the world that’s been, you know, so looked at?”

We went into the garden to pick out a poison blocker

We saw fish mint

A lizard’s tail

A chameleon plant

I turn the river over to rub its belly

My pronouns are shipyard, jellyfish & ten

An onion asleep is a congregation

A bear cry is the sound a bear makes while feeding baby birds to comfort them

The Garden of Membranes is a tiny forest and bespoke ecosystem and living sonic sculpture made from Bonsai trees and other small tree-like plants. This sits in a 3D printed bowl which sits on a plinth made from Birch plywood which stands in the middle of the space. What space? Your choice. In the branches of the miniature trees are hidden miniature speakers, thru which can be heard tiny electrical signals known as “action potentials.” The sounds of tiny animals, birds and entire soundscapes mapped from large areas of the Amazon, can also be heard. But it’s only after Laura suddenly strikes off on her own, moving from her brother’s home in London to a small village in the Chiltern Hills called Great Mop, does the novel’s muted occult strain come to the fore. A small kitten turns up in Laura’s rented bedroom. She is not sure how it found its way in, and when she reaches down to stroke it, it suddenly bites and claws at her, raising a single “bright round drop of blood.” Laura is overcome: Not for a moment did she doubt. But so deadly, so complete was the certainty that it seemed to paralyze her powers of understanding, like a snake-bite in the brain. She, Laura Willowes, in England, in the year 1922, had entered into a compact with the Devil. The compact was made, and affirmed, and sealed with the round red seal of her blood. Satan had always had his eye on Laura, she now realizes. Great Mop soon turns out to be full of witches and warlocks, and in a pastoral Black Sabbath Laura enjoys a dance with a pasty-faced and anaemic young slattern whom she had seen dawdling around the village ... they whirled faster and faster, fused together like two suns that whirl and blaze in a single destruction ... The contact made her tingle from head to foot. Witchcraft is neither lesbianism nor Communism — at least, never explicitly so. Laura is now an inheritrix of aged magic.